Summer is prime time for Texas sunfish
The two teenage boys had one of the best parts of summer fishing in Texas figured out last Friday morning.
They could have been using the trolling motor on their johnboat to ease parallel to the shoreline of the 60-acre private lake in eastern Montgomery County, chunking topwaters or jigs or plastic worms, or even working crankbaits on the deepwater side of the line of aquatic vegetation and almost certainly connecting now and again with some of the reservoir’s robust largemouth bass.
But they weren’t. They chose to take advantage of one of the most productive, consistent, predictable and just down-right enjoyable opportunities available to freshwater anglers during the early weeks of a Texas summer. They were targeting sunfish. And they had hit the bull’s eye.
Anchored in the middle of a sand/gravel-bottomed flat, they were fast to fish almost as quickly as they could bait their hook with a wriggling piece of night crawler and cast the rig onto the flat where the little orange cork that suspended the bait maybe 3 feet deep would almost immediately bobble and disappear. They had set the hook, and the light spinning rods each used bowed as they reeled in another flapping, hand-size bluegill.
More than a dozen species
Bluegill are just one of the more than a dozen species of sunfish found in Texas waters. Most Texans wrap the whole lot of them under the umbrella of “perch” or bream” or “sun perch,” with many not bothering or knowing how to differentiate between the species.
Some sunfish — such as flier and rock bass — are found in only small areas of the state. Others — dollar, bantam and redspotted — seldom grow to more than 3 or 4 inches in length, too small to be of any consequence to anglers.
A half-dozen or so sunfish species do get big enough to be real players for recreational anglers. And those sunfish — particularly bluegill, redear and redbreast — hold a crucial spot in Texas freshwater fishing culture. Sunfish are the fish most of us first targeted as youngsters — a nod to their ubiquitousness and angler-friendly aggressiveness. But they also can be one of the most enjoyable and, yes, challenging fish to pursue even for experienced anglers.
It doesn’t hurt that sunfish are some of the most delicious of fish. Gutted, gilled, scaled, dredged in cornmeal and fried in a cast-iron skillet, sunfish, with their flaky, sweet, delicate texture, are an exquisite treat on a summertime table. No wonder they are often called, simply, “panfish.”
They could be called “summer-fish,” too. Summer is when sunfish shine.
A big part of that seasonal sparkle is tied directly to the fishes’ behavior. Early summer is when most sunfish spawn, and the onset of this warmest season of the year gins up sunfishes’ cold-blooded metabolism, turning them into aggressive eating machines. The combination puts “bream” at their most accessible and vulnerable to anglers.
The two young anglers on the Montgomery County lake late last week knew and had taken advantage of that behavior. The flat they fished had not been chosen at random. It was the site of an extensive bluegill spawning concentration. The bottom of the flat was pocked with scores of plate-size depressions, areas fanned clear of silt and picked clean of aquatic vegetation — bluegill spawning beds.
Those beds were occupied by the male bluegill that made them or the larger female bluegill whose eggs were, or soon would be deposited, on the prepared site. Often, both were there. And all of them were willing to grab anything that looked like food or a threat to the nest.
The boys were having a ball with the bluegill, landing fish after fish. During the 10 minutes or so I watched them from the shore, they landed at least a couple of dozen fish. Most they unhooked and released. Some — hand-size and larger ones that weighed a half-pound or so and glistened blue-black in the morning sunlight — went into an ice chest.
Texas is blessed with scores of great sunfish waters. Sunfish of some sort live in almost every piece of freshwater in Texas, from drainage ditches to major reservoirs. But first-rate sunfish fisheries — waters where it is possible to catch fish weighing a half-pound or more and sometimes twice that — are relatively rare.
Bass helps provide balance
Invariably, those premier sunfish fisheries have something in common — they are either also a great bass fishery or they are a river. Sometimes, both.
Sunfish are such prodigious reproducers that, if left unchecked, they quickly overpopulate a fishery, overwhelming available habitat and forage. The result is stunting, where few fish grow to even 6 inches. But if the population is kept at a relatively low or moderate level, the fishery can thrive, giving fish enough habitat and forage to reach their growth potential.
For sunfish, that balance comes at the price of heavy predation that keeps the population in check. And largemouth bass are the planet’s premier sunfish-eating machines. Fisheries where sunfish share their homes with thriving largemouth bass populations are the ones with the highest quality sunfish.
That is reflected in a list of some of the premier bluegill fisheries in the state. Top bluegill waters in Texas include such major reservoirs as Toledo Bend, Conroe, Fork and smaller waters such as Lake Raven in Huntsville State Park, Purtis Creek Lake and Lake Murvaul — all of them top-flight bass fisheries.
Texas’ premier fisheries for redear sunfish, which rival bluegills in popularity among serious sunfish anglers, also are found in waters with strong bass populations. Redears, which have their peak spawning period this month, tend to set up their spawning beds in a bit deeper water than bluegills. Those spawning sites often are on sandy-bottomed flats holding 3-6 feet of water and peppered with abundant submerged vegetation.
Redears are especially attracted to littoral areas preferred by aquatic snails and other hardshelled forage such as crawfish and water fleas. Redears prey heavily on those crunchy items, leading most anglers to call the fish “shellcrackers.” That diet may account for their relative large size; they typically are one of the largest sunfish found in Texas waters, with redears weighing a pound or more not uncommon in some of the best fisheries.
Texas’ premier redear fisheries include Fayette County Reservoir as well as lakes Raven, Purtis Creek, Tyler and Athens.
But anglers looking to connect with some of the largest sunfish in Texas, especially redbreast sunfish, focus on rivers and river/lake hybrids in central Texas.
Redbreasts are, at their heart, river/stream creatures, although they do well in some reservoirs. Like their cousins, their deep, compressed bodies aren’t made for life in moving water. But they thrive in the eddies and deep pools, where they wait to ambush minnows, aquatic insects and even terrestrial forage such as grasshoppers carried to them by the flow.
And they get big — at least big for a sunfish.
Redbreasts, which anglers can be forgiven for misidentifying as longear sunfish because of the elongated opercle flap (“ear”) extending from their gill plate, are the most common sunfish encountered by anglers fishing rivers such as the Guadalupe, San Marcos, Llano, Nueces, Frio, Sabinal, San Saba and other streams in Central Texas. And the fish are not at all shy about slamming artificial lures; small (1/8-ounce or lighter) jigs, plastic “tube” worms and even plugs mated to an ultralight spinning rig spooled with 4- to 6-pound test line and worked in eddies or around rocks or other cover in deep pools will draw a hammering strike from redbreasts and any other sunfish within pouncing distance.
Having fun on the fly
For fly-fishers, a 4- or 5-weight rod, floating line and a 7-foot leader and 2X or 3X tippet fit with a popper, sponge spider, grasshopper imitation, woolly worm or muddler is guaranteed to keep them busy fighting redbreasts and other sunfish that use their deep body and stubborn stamina as leverage in what usually is a short but spirited fight.
Those rivers in central Texas and the reservoirs built on them hold some of the overall bestquality sunfish fisheries in the state. That is supported by Texas’ records for sunfish landed by anglers. The state-record bluegill — a 2.02-pounder — was taken from the Lampasas River. The 2.99-pound record redear and the 1.30-pound record warmouth (goggle-eye) were landed from Lady Bird Lake, the narrow reservoir on the Colorado River in downtown Austin. The record redbreast, at 1.63 pounds, came from the Comal River, and the biggest longear sunfish from San Marcos River.
But anglers don’t target sunfish because they are hoping for a record catch. They are fishing for something else — the pure joy of connecting with wild, native fish that embody the essence of summer. That and the makings of a great supper. There is nothing better under the summer Texas sun.